


Adaptations

by rachealsAO3



Series: Human Journals AU [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Human journals AU, The Journals (Gravity Falls), only "original" characters are the journals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-08 13:54:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18624601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachealsAO3/pseuds/rachealsAO3
Summary: Some books turned into some kids, and now everyone has to adapt.A look at the first year that Albert, Nikola and Isaac spend with Stan.





	Adaptations

Stan didn’t think he would ever get used to waking up to someone else screaming in the middle of the night.

Every time it woke him up, his first thought was always that something terrible had happened- they were being robbed, someone was trying to kidnap the boys, a murderer had broken in. He always found himself halfway to their room with a baseball bat before he remembered that Isaac had been having nightmares.

He set the bat down before he opened the door, going straight for Isaac’s bed. The kid was screaming and flailing around, his blankets tangled up around him.

“Isaac,” Stan said, not bothering to be quiet- he couldn’t be any louder than the banshee wailing that Isaac could pull off. He managed to avoid getting hit in the face as he grabbed Isaac’s shoulders, shaking him. “Isaac! Wake up!”

The screaming cut off with a strangled choking sound as Isaac’s eyes popped open. He threw himself back and out of Stan’s hands, staring at him with wide eyes for a moment before his face screwed up, tears forming in his eyes as the first sob forced its way out of him.

“Hey,” Stan said softly. “Hey, hey, hey, it’s okay, c’mon-“ Stan climbed onto the bed, awkwardly moving to sit beside him and pulling him into a hug. “It’s okay.”

He looked out into the room and found two more sets of eyes staring back at him from the dim light of the nightlight. (Albert had requested it a few days after the boys had _woken up_ , as Stan had tentatively started referring to it.) Nik and Albert looked like they always did when Isaac woke up screaming- like they wanted to help, but were too afraid to, hovering right at the edge of the bed, but not daring to set a foot on the floor.

Stan sighed.

For the first couple of days, having the three of them share the attic had gone fine. But then Isaac had started having nightmares, keeping Nik and Albert up almost every night. And then Nik and Albert had started arguing nonstop- over whose side of the room was whose, over touching each other’s stuff, over who was breathing too loud at night. It was driving Stan kind of nuts, if he was being honest.

He’d been working on them getting their own rooms, but it was taking a while to find a place to put them. The Mystery Shack had plenty of room, no doubt about it; the problem was all the stuff he’d crammed into those rooms over the years. He’d been taking some things out of Ford’s old parlor, thinking Albert could move down there, but he had no idea where he could put Nik. Maybe he could clean out that room he’d put the wax figures in? Interest in his own wax museum had gone down after the fancy one a couple of hours away had opened, and he could probably sell the statues for a good price-

His train of thought got interrupted by a particularly strong sniff, Isaac’s arms tightening around his rib cage. He moved his focus back to the kid- there would be time to think about it later.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Stan asked, trying for a gentle tone. Isaac hiccuped, burying his head into Stan’s shoulder.

“There was a- was a- was a monster,” he stammered.

“Breathe, kiddo.”

Isaac took a deep breath. It didn’t seem to help very much. “And- and Ford was there and it- and it killed him, and- and then it-“

He hiccuped again, and then he was back to unintelligible sobs.

The nightmares had started only a couple of days after Stan had found the kids, and after nearly a month they didn’t look like they were going anywhere anytime soon. Stan had no idea how to help him, and, as he tightened his hold on the still-crying Isaac, he wondered not for the first time if keeping them was _really_ the best idea.

“Alright,” Stan eventually sighed, standing and picking Isaac up. “You wanna come sleep in my bed for the rest of the night?”

The books he’d been reading had warned against letting your kids share your bed- something about codependency or whatever- but Stan had figured out it was the quickest way to get Isaac to go back to sleep, and the quickest way to let Albert and Nik get back to sleep, too. It was still strange to wake up a half hour before his alarm with a little kid excitedly rambling about whatever they had planned for the day, but this was Gravity Falls.

Stan could deal with strange.

Isaac nodded his head against Stan’s shoulder, so he carried him out and back to his own room. It took a few moments for them to get situated in Stan’s bed, but it wasn’t long until Isaac was drifting off to sleep, his arms around Stan’s torso as he used his shoulder as a pillow.

Stan didn’t think he would ever get used to waking up to screaming in the middle of the night. But, as he fell asleep to Isaac’s soft, even breathing, he thought that this might be something he _could_ get used to.

Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea to keep them, after all.

 

* * *

 

 

He’d gone back to the opposite line of thinking by the next afternoon.

“Stan!”

Stan flipped the page of the book he’d been reading the past few days during the slow hours at the Shack. Given that it was January, he got a lot of reading in. All about how to deal with kids and nightmares. He figured about eighty percent of it was garbage (it gave him very hippie/only feed your children kale/vaccines cause autism vibes) but there were a few good chapters.

“ _Stan_!”

He huffed and looked up over the register at Nik, a bit surprised to see Soos standing behind him.

He’d told Soos that they were his nephews from upstate whose parents had died. He’d been a little worried that he would ask too many questions, or go and tell the wrong person, but Stan shouldn’t have been concerned- the kid had always seemed to accept his word as unquestionable law, and this had been no different.

He rose an eyebrow at the sight of his handyman- handyboy? Whatever. Was he already done with school for the day? Stan must have lost track of time. “What is it, kid? I’m a little busy with-“

“It’s an emergency!” Soos said, and Stan’s heart skipped a beat.

“What- what kind of emergency?” he asked, getting to his feet and walking around the counter.

Was it Albert? Was it Isaac? Were they hurt? He really hoped no one was hurt- Stan hadn’t come up with a good enough story to explain to a doctor why three undocumented children had suddenly come into his care.

“There’s a rabbit,” Nik said, grabbing his hand and starting to tug him towards the gift shop door. “It’s stuck in a trap!”

Stan stopped. Nik turned back and tugged on his hand. “Stan-“

“A rabbit?” he asked, unimpressed. Nik glared at him.

“It’s hurt!”

“How far into the woods did you go to find a trap like that?”

“ _Stan_ , a rabbit’s life is on the line!”

“Yeah, Mr. Pines!” Soos spoke up, his eyes wide and pleading. Stan quickly looked away from him, only to find the same expression on Nik’s face.

Stan sighed. “Alright, alright- Albert!”

He heard a thud from the living room, and a few moments later Albert came through the employee’s only door, book still in hand. “What.”

“Watch the gift shop for a bit.”

Albert scowled. “Why?”

“Because a rabbit’s life is on the line? Don’t look so scandalized, kid, I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m not handing the business down to you.”

He followed Nik and Soos outside and into the woods. It was a good fifteen minutes before they reached their destination, right on the edge of Manly Dan’s property. The trap was one of those small metal cages with a door that closed behind the animal whenever they tried to get the bait. Stan had used them before to trap the raccoons that liked to get into his garbage.

The rabbit inside of it was small, and missing half of its left ear. It looked more like what Stan would consider a bunny rather than a wild rabbit, with long, white fluffy fur and a little round tail, a black spot over its right eye. One of its back legs was bloody and broken, and as they approached the cage it didn’t even move; just looked up at them as warily as a bunny could.

“Can you get him out?” Nik asked, crouching by the cage. Soos knelt beside him and poked his fingers through, not quite able to reach the rabbit, who seemed to shift a little closer to him.

That was odd. Stan stooped down and looked more closely at the animal. Maybe it was someone’s escaped pet? It would make more sense. Most of the wild rabbits around Gravity Falls had short brown hair and short little ears, and were a hell of a lot bigger than this little thing.

“Well?” Nik pressed, frowning.

“It’d be best to take it back to the Shack before we let it out,” Stan sighed, resigning himself to nursing a bunny back to health.  “So it can’t run away.”

“Good thinking, Mr. Pines!” Soos said, reaching forward and picking up one end of the cage. Nik quickly reached over and made sure the rabbit didn’t get too jostled.

“ _Careful_!” Nik stressed. “You could hurt it more!”

“Oh, right! Sorry!”

Stan grabbed onto the cage, gently tugging it out of their grasp. “Why don’t _I_ carry it back?”

Nik pouted at him, but Soos nodded. “Of course! Good idea, Mr. Pines!”

The rabbit shifted a couples of times, turning to look at sudden noises or jumping when Nik or Soos got too loud, but was still for most of the walk home.

“Finally,” Albert huffed when they walked into the gift shop, jumping off the stool he’d claimed. Stan, arms full of rabbit cage, shook his head at him.

“Need you to watch the shop while I deal with this, too.”

“ _Stan_ ,” Albert said, his eyes darting towards a woman in the back of the store, their only customer. Stan sighed.

“Listen, check someone out just this one time and we can have whatever you want for dinner, okay?” he offered, heading for the employees only door. “I’ll even order from out in the city and drive the whole forty-five minutes to go pick it up.”

He ignored the kid’s groaning and headed to the kitchen, setting the cage down on the table. Nik and Soos stepped closer, leaning forward to look into the cage.

“Can we let it out now?” Nik asked.

“Let’s, uh- let’s lay some towels out, first,” Stan said, eyeing the rabbit’s bloody fur. “Soos, you wanna go grab a few?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Pines!” he said, and Stan watched as he hurried to the stairs, catching himself as he tripped over the first step.

“Do you think we can help it?” Nik asked, poking a finger into the cage to pet the rabbit’s head. Stan shrugged as it twitched its nose.

“I can probably put a bandage or something on the leg, but I don’t know about the ear,” he said, leaning closer. “It looks like it wasn’t recent, at least. Healed a lot on its own.”

“Could the vet help it?”

“I don’t know if Dr. Katz sees rab-“

“ _What is that_.”

Stan and Nik turned to see Isaac standing in the doorway, mouth open and eyes starry as he stared at the animal. Soos quickly appeared behind him, holding an armful of towels.

“Did we get a _bunny_?!” Isaac asked, bouncing over to the table. “Is it a boy or a girl? Are we keeping it? What’s its name? Stan, are we _getting a pet bunny_?”

For a moment, the thought of keeping the rabbit longer than the time it would take to nurse it back to health was an automatic no-go for Stan. But then, seeing Isaac had him thinking back to that book he had been reading, and one of the chapters _had_ said it could be helpful to give your kid a pet to focus on- to tell them it would protect them at night, or something.

“Of course not,” Nik said, helping Soos start to lay out the towels. “We’re just-“

“Of course!” Stan said. Isaac lit up, a smile stretching across his face. “In fact, it’s all yours, why don’t you give it a name?”

“What,” Nik said. “Stan-“

He pulled Nik to the side as Isaac started to dance around the cage, whispering so that Isaac couldn’t hear. “Listen, I read that this might help with the nightmares. You can keep the next injured thing we drag in here.”

Nik sighed. “It’s fine. I’d wanna lizard, anyway. Or a raccoon.”

Stan blinked as Nik stepped back over to the other boys, and wondered for a second if he should be worried about the raccoon thing.

He really hoped he didn’t need to be.

 

* * *

 

 

Isaac named the rabbit Coraline, after some character from a book that Stan had grabbed out of the kids’ section of the library. (He hadn’t actually known if Isaac would even be able to read the book- he hadn’t been sure what level a 6-year-old should be reading at, but he had figured that if Albert could understand calculus already than surely Ford had taught Isaac how to read long books. He’d been right.)

Coraline was a weird rabbit. It didn’t fidget at all while Stan did his best to get it clean, cutting off fur that had gotten matted with blood, and trying to wash the rest with a damp dishrag. He still let Isaac hold it on the table as a precaution, Nik and Soos close by to help catch it if it got away, but in the end it wasn’t needed. The thing didn’t even flinch as Stan wrapped its leg up with the gauze bandages they’d found in the first aid kit. After that, it had seemed fine, hopping around the table, and investigating them and the chairs.

Stan had been hesitant to let it start roaming around the house, but Isaac had promised to follow it around and keep it out of trouble, so the rabbit was released from the kitchen. Stan didn’t think very much of it after that, relieving Albert from Gift Shop duty, and didn’t see it again until dinner- which ended up being Chinese takeout, per Albert’s request.

“Is that thing begging?” Stan asked, glancing at the rabbit that sat on two legs next to Isaac’s chair, staring at him with soulful eyes. “Are rabbits supposed to be able to beg?”

“I don’t believe so,” Albert said. “It has very odd-“

“She,” Isaac corrected. Albert blinked at him.

“She? Did you check?”

“No, she told me.”

Albert opened his mouth, and then closed it. Nik laughed.

Isaac ignored them, and jumped out of his seat, walking over to the fridge. “Don’t rabbits eat carrots?”

Stan frowned and tried to remember what they had in the fridge. “Uh, I don’t think we have any of those.”

“They wouldn’t be very good for a rabbit, anyway,” Albert said, and Stan turned back towards him to see that he’d also abandoned the table. He sat in the floor, his legs crossed, a small notepad out as he studied the rabbit that was currently standing up on its hind legs to look into the fridge with Isaac. “They’re high in sugar and I don’t think they would be a normal part of a feral rabbit’s diet, considering they’re a root veg-“

“Oh my god,” Nik groaned, pushing his chair back from the table and letting his head fall back, his hands covering his face. “You made the bunny _boring_.”

“ _Nik_ ,” Stan said, already feeling a headache forming.

“No I _didn’t_ ,” Albert said, straightening up.

“ _Albert_ ,” Stan said.

“Yes, you _did_.”

“I did _not!_ Knowing what foods it can eat-“

“Is boring!”

“Just because _you_ like being an idiot doesn’t mean everyone else does, _Nikola_.“

Nikola’s chair scraped the floor as he stood up. “I- !”

“Hey!” Stan yelled, finally grabbing their attention. “Both of you, cut it out! Save the arguing for when I’m not around, okay?”

Nik huffed and marched out of the room, his footsteps just barely stomps as he disappeared into the living room. Albert stared at his notebook, scowling.

“Albert,” Stan said quietly. “Don’t call your brother an idiot, okay?”

Albert’s head snapped up. “Oh, but he gets to call me boring-“

“ _No_ , no, that’s not- listen, I’ll talk to him, too, okay?” Stan sighed, closing his eyes. “He doesn’t get to call you stuff either. But- just don’t do it, all right?”

Albert flipped his notebook shut and got to his feet, and Stan watched as he stomped up the stairs, scowling.

Stan sighed. Behind him, Isaac closed the fridge.

“… Can I give Coraline an apple?”

Stan stood up and walked over to the counter and tried not to think about how he’d felt when people had called him an idiot when he was a kid. “Yeah, sure. Give it here, I’ll cut it up.”

Isaac pushed the step stool up to the counter beside him, and hopped up on it so he could lean on the counter. The rabbit followed him, resting its front paws on top of the stool. Isaac watched him peel the apple (Stan didn’t know if the thing could eat the peel) and chop it up into little pieces, taking them as Stan cut them up and stooping down so the rabbit could eat out of his hand.

Stan was starting to wonder if it might be a dog, and they just hadn’t realized because it looked weirdly similar to a rabbit.  

“Hey, Stan?” Isaac eventually asked.

“Yeah?”

“Are Nik and Al mad because of me?”

Stan stopped, turning to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “What? What do you mean?”

Isaac frowned, and fed the rabbit another piece of apple.

“Kid?”

“I just- is it because I keep them up at night? That they’re always mad?”

Stan put down the knife, his heart suddenly tight in his chest, and leaned forward so that he and Isaac were eye level, leaning on the counter. “Now you listen to me: nothing that goes on with those two is your fault, okay? They’re mad because they’re always mad at each other, and that’s something that they’ve gotta work out themselves. And even if they’re a little grumpy because you woke ‘em up a few times, that’s not your fault either, because it’s not your fault that you have nightmares. Alright?”

Isaac nodded at him, staring down at the counter, his lips pulled into a pout that would’ve been cute in any other situation. Now it just wrenched at his heart. A lot of stuff ran through Stan’s head, but as he watched the kid offer the rabbit another piece of apple, his thoughts landed on the book he’d been reading earlier that day- the reason he’d decided to let Isaac keep the weird little bunny.

“Hey,” he said, straightening back up and taking the knife again, cutting up the last of the apple. “You know that, uh, Coraline-“

“Cory,” Isaac corrected him. “She wants to be called Cory.”

“Uh, right, so- Cory, she, uh, she could help you out. With the nightmares.”

The look Isaac gave him was skeptical. “What.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to tell you that she’ll eat the bad dreams, or whatever, but- maybe if you ever feel, I don’t know, scared or worried or something at night while you’re trying to fall asleep, she can help you know whether or not you need to be? Like, if she’s calm, then you can be, too.”

Isaac looked back down at the rabbit, who pawed at his leg, probably in hopes of getting more apple. Stan nudged him, and pushed the rest of the pieces over toward him, throwing the knife in the sink and taking the core over to the trash.

“And I bet she could eat nightmares if she really wanted to. She’s a weird rabbit.”

“No, she would tell me,” he said. “Come on, Cory, I think you’ve had enough.”

He hopped off the stool and picked the rabbit up, carrying her out of the kitchen. Stan looked around at the kitchen- at everyone’s half-finished food left on the table, at the dishes that had started piling up in the sink. He sighed and stepped back over to the table, grabbing the take out boxes first, and thinking that if he could redo his childhood, he’d wash the dishes for his mother every night.

 

* * *

 

 

Stan woke up to screaming at two that morning. This time, the baseball bat only made it to his bedroom door before he chucked it back toward the general direction of his bed.

He’d gotten there quick enough that Albert and Nik had only just woken up, blinking sleep out of their eyes as they sat up. The rabbit- Cory- had hidden under the bed, poking her head out to stare up at them, her ears flat against her head.

“Isaac,” Stan said, taking him by the shoulders. “Isaac, buddy, wake up, you’re okay.”

His eyes snapped open, and this time he threw himself at Stan, his arms wrapping tight around his waist as the screams were abruptly replaced with sobs.

“You’re okay,” Stan repeated. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”

He didn’t bother asking tonight- he hefted the kid up and started to carry him toward the door, stopping when he felt something rub against his foot. Cory stared up at him.

“You can come, too,” he sighed, and the rabbit followed him out into the hallway and over to his own room. Isaac was still sobbing as he carried him over to the bed. Once they got settled in and Isaac’s cries had dwindled down to sniffles, Stan spoke up again. “So, do you wanna talk about it, or… ?”

Isaac, curled up against Stan’s side and using him as a pillow, shook his head against Stan’s chest. Stan chewed on the inside of his lip and thought about all of the advice he’d been reading about in those books.

“Kid, I- I think you should. Talk about it.”

Isaac hesitated, his fingers curling into the fabric of Stan’s shirt. “I don’t- it’s _scary_.”

“I know,” Stan said, keeping his voice at a whisper- he didn’t want the kid to hear any of his uncertainty. “But I think- if you don’t talk about it, it’ll just get worse. The scary thoughts, the dreams- they’ll just get scarier.”

Isaac was quiet for a long time. Cory, who had started off laying at the end of the bed, had slowly worked her way up to Isaac’s feet before he spoke again.

“I always dream about the monsters. And Ford. And the monsters-“ he stopped, and he tightened his hands into fists around Stan’s shirt. Stan almost didn’t hear what he said next. “The monsters always kill him.”

Stan tightened his hold on the kid, using the arm he had wrapped around him to squish him more firmly into his side. His mind raced to find something to say. “I- we’ve not really talked about Ford, have we?”

Isaac hesitated again. “It- it makes Nik and Al angry.”

“And they’re not here right now.”

“… I miss him.”

“I know. I do too.”

“I- I’m scared. That I won’t see him again.”

Stan swallowed. “I am, too.”

Isaac sniffed. “And- and I know that you said Ford was strong, but- what if he’s not strong enough?”

Stan was quiet for a moment, because he didn’t know what to say to that, because he’d thought the same thing a million times over the past twenty years. (And he couldn’t tell Isaac to drink beer after beer until the thought went away for a while.) “Well- tell me, was there ever anything in Gravity Falls that Ford couldn’t take?”

Isaac moved his head and re-positioned himself so that he was looking up him, his fingers loosening their hold in his shirt. “I don’t think so?”

“Well, then, there you have it! What could be weirder or more dangerous than this place?”

Isaac didn’t respond. He frowned, putting his head back down, but he released Stan’s shirt and motioned at Cory, who hopped over to cuddle in between the two of them. Stan suddenly got very afraid of rolling over on the thing in the middle of the night. Isaac seemed content, though, so he just resolved to sleep very lightly that night.

After a little while, seeing that neither of them were going to fall asleep any time soon, Stan let his curiosity get the best of him. “Hey, Isaac?”

“Mhm?”

“What was- what was living with Ford like?”

Isaac looked back up at him. “It was… different than this.”

Stan put up his hardest poker face. “How so?”

“… Ford didn’t have a TV,” Isaac eventually said. “Not one that was for anything but watching experiment tapes. I like your TV. It has Pokémon.”

Stan chuckled. “I’m glad you like the TV, kid, but I mean… what was _he_ like?”

Isaac frowned, and pulled Cory closer. She didn’t seem to mind. “He had a lot more rules than you.”

“Like what?”

“We didn’t get to go outside a lot. And I wasn’t allowed to touch anything in the labs and stuff because I didn’t know enough yet. Nik wasn’t allowed to touch stuff because he broke a lot of stuff, but he didn’t do it on purpose. Most of the time. Sometimes we weren’t allowed to leave our room for the day, but most of the time it was because it was dangerous, because an experiment had gone bad or something. But Nik used to have to stay in our room because he was in trouble.”

“Did Nik get in trouble a lot?”

Isaac nodded. “Ford used to teach Nik and Al the _really_ smart stuff, like physics and calculus, but Nik didn’t like to pay attention, and he didn’t do a lot of the worksheets Ford made them. And he used to sneak outside a lot. Al always said that he liked to push Ford’s buttons.”

“And… was that all Ford did? When Nik got in trouble? Make him stay in your room?”

“Ford yelled at him, sometimes,” Isaac shrugged. “But Fiddleford usually didn’t let him.”

Stan’s heart skipped a beat. “Fiddleford? I’m sorry, do you- you don’t happen to mean Fiddleford _McGucket_ , do you?”

Isaac gave him a weird look as Stan tried not to freak out. “Yeah? Why, does he still live in Gravity Falls?”

“I- I guess? Maybe? It- it might just be- be a relative, or something-“ Stan’s brain was short circuiting, but Isaac didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh. Well, he was Ford’s assistant until he left. After that was when Ford started to act weird.”

Stan had a lot of questions about why the _fuck_ Old Man McGucket ever worked as Ford’s assistant, but decided to put that revelation to the side for another day. “Weird? Do you mean like what I talked about, when you guys woke up?”

Isaac nodded. “He stopped sleeping, and he stopped teaching us, and he yelled a lot more. There were a lot more rules. He was kind of scary, sometimes, but Al said it wasn’t his fault. Al said he was just trying to protect us.”

“Scary how?” Stan asked, his heart twisting in his chest.

“He would talk about how we had to be careful because monsters and demons were coming for us. And I don’t think he wanted to be around us. He locked himself in the basement a lot. And talked to himself. And he would yell at us for no reason.”

Stan stayed quiet, but Isaac didn’t continue. By the next time he spoke, Stan had thought he’d fallen asleep.

“Stan?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you gonna turn us back? Like Ford did?”

Stan didn’t even have to think about his next answer, tightening the one-armed hold he had on the kid and possibly crushing Cory between them. “Of course not. Never in a million fu- freaking years.”

**Author's Note:**

> I definitely meant to start putting out more of this series a lot sooner, and my only excuse is that college started and I'm majoring in history and minoring in German and theatre and I don't have a whole lot of time.


End file.
